Glasser gives listeners something to watch
Glasser’s Cameron Mesirow was one of the exceptions at the recent South by Southwest Music Conference in Austin, Texas. Unlike many “must-see” bands, she only performed twice during the five-day festival; some bands played seven or eight times as many gigs.
“I refuse to be that kind of band,” Mesirow says with a laugh. “Seventeen shows in five days? I bet 16 of those shows didn’t matter to them.”
Mesirow treats each of her shows as an event, with a visual panache to match her vocal abilities and unconventional yet highly melodic songs. She opened her first show in Austin with a rapturous a cappella version of a traditional Irish ballad, “Let No Man Steal Your Thyme,” then dove into the layered, swirling avant-pop of her hypnotic 2010 debut album, “Ring” (True Panther Sounds). She matched the swooning arrangements with shaman-like twitching and dancing in a layered hoop dress. It was simple but mesmerizing theater, the kind of showmanship that frankly not enough pop concerts have.
“I suppose the drive to do something more than just stand there and sing comes from being a bored spectator,” she says. “I find self-indulgence on stage kind of horrifying. But I know I’m being self-indulgent dressing up and playing my own music, I just don’t want to bore anyone. I have never understood how visual aesthetics for so many people have so little do with their musical aesthetic. Where did those two break away from each other? I would think they would be constantly informing each other. For so many people they’re secondary, or tertiary.”
Mesirow grew up in Boston and later San Francisco with parents steeped in the arts. Her father, who grew up in north surburban Glencoe, taught her to play guitar and is currently performing with the Blue Man Group in Berlin. Her mother cofounded the new-wave band Human Sexual Response.
“I realize now it was a massive influence, having parents involved in music the way they are,” Mesirow says. “At the time though, I don’t think I appreciated it. For a long time I was embarrassed that my mother was in a band called Human Sexual Response. As a kid dealing with that – you can just imagine. But, of course, now I’m proud of it. They had one reunion and I remember them making costumes for it. The punks were concerned with keeping the edges very sharp. I think that rubbed off.”
Though she performed in high school musicals and played guitar and piano, Mesirow took her time diving into music. She studied linguistics and German literature at San Francisco State University.
“Maybe three years ago right after college, I just decided to make music a full-time thing,” she says. “It wasn’t a plan. It was like a secret yearning. I was wishing some band would figure out I could sing. But nobody called, so I ahd to do it myself.”
She moved to Los Angeles and scrounged around for part-time work while writing songs on her laptop. she laid down the vocals for one of her best songs, “Apply,” while working part-time at a shoe store.
“I didn’t have the resources to hire a band or record in a studio, so I just started working with songs on the computer,” she says. “At first, I was such a musical purist I was embarrassed about doing it that way. But then I got into the more garbage-y aspects of creating music on a computer. It was all very nontraditional and nonlinear in a way, but it had to have a hook, a melody. I’d say the connective thread was that it was all very emotional. I don’t necessarily see writing narrative style lyrics as part of that expression. I think it’s more about melodies that take people by storm.”
Her songs filtered onto various Web sites and led to live appearances in Los Angeles. Her first gig was performed with her iPod, a couple of singers and a guitarist as a backing band. “I’m not sure I could’ve gone up there if people hadn’t said they liked the recordings,” she said. “I didn’t think my voice was a sound people would like. But people told me otherwise. It made me feel bolder about putting myself out there in a number of ways.”
After a 2009 one-woman-band EP, dubbed “Apply” after the shoe-store song, she recorded the 2010 full-length, “Ring,” with a more elaborate vision and additional instrumentalists and producers. But the core of the album was recorded on her own, albeit with a more ambitious sense of layering. One track alone, “Treasury of We,” has 47 tracks, mostly vocals, that Mesirow recorded on her laptop – nearly to her eternal regret.
“I got a little carried away and all those tracks crashed my computer,” she says. “I had to go to a file-saving place to save that song. It almost didn’t exist. A lot of worry and sweaty palms were involved. They managed to save it for me. I thought, ‘Enough of this.’ But I can’t afford to work in a real studio. Eventually when choirs are interested in Glasser, I can reap the benefits. But until then, I’ll keep improvising.”
greg@gregkot.com
Glasser with TV on the Radio at 9 p.m. April 22 at Metro, 3730 N. Clark St., $32; etix.com.
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